My wife recently visited the Ruben H. Fleet Science Center in Balboa Park (San Diego). Apparently, they were having a show about circuses, and how some things look fake (sword swallowing for example), but are actually real.
One exhibit showed a unicorn skull, with a caption saying that unicorns are no longer mythical. I found a picture of it online here. So what’s going on? Is this a manufactured fake, a mutant oryx, or what?
All unicorns had spiral horns.
The “Living Unicorn Project” was a thing – or a thang – in the eighties.
Someone figured out how to transplant “horn buds” on ordinary Angora goats from one site to another, so the two horns grew together as one. (Not, however, in a spiral.)
Presto chango! A goat with “one horn.” It’s like magic, innit? Wanna prove to someone that you’re still a virgin? Go up and pet the li’l fellow. Watch out he doesn’t eat the cuffs off your shirt.
A single horn doesn’t exist in nature, because it would be growing right on a cranial (frontal) suture, and apparently horns don’t grow on sutures in nature. One of those union workplace clauses, I reckon.
(The Narwhal has two horns, but one is usually much larger than the other. Doesn’t count. It is, however, often spiral-shaped.)
ETA: the photo you linked to is something else entirely, called “Sculpture.” Fake as [strikeout]the Shroud of Turin[/strikeout] a three dollar bill.
A fake, and not a very good one. As best I can tell, the skull is a deer or elk. The horn isn’t even a real narwhal, but a poor copy of one.
Three dollar bills are only fake if made as U.S. currency which didn’t start until 1861-2. Before that there were many private banks that made three dollar bills.
Nitpick over.
Nitpick: what narwhals have are tusks- they’re overgrown teeth.
Actually, the modern history of “manufactured unicorns” begins with Franklin W. Dove of the University of Maine, who figured out how to fuse horn buds from a calf in the 1930s, and created a “unicorn bull”. It was written up in a number of news reports, and by pop science writer (and literal rocket scientist) Willy Ley . Ley speculated that the goat-like unicorns depicted in several Medieval Tapestries, which have un-horselike features like cloven hooves and a beard – might be such “manufactured” unicorns made from goats. (The famous Unicorn in Captivity Tapestry in the Cloisters Collection in New York is probably the most famous of these)
Dove wrote his stuff up in a scientific paper, and it was mainly forgotten. Until a modern “magician” named Timothy Zell (AKA Otter G’Zell), along with his wife Morning Glory repeated the experiments, producing goatish unicorns that they showed at Renaissance Fairs and the like. (They also founded The Church of All Worlds – named after Valentine Michael Smith’s church in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Zell also carried on a correspondence with Heinlein, who disavowed any connections with Zell’s Church).
Eventually they sold one of the Goaticorns to the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus, who exhibited it in New York and were promptly clobbered with criticism from animal-rights people, who saw this as cruel mutilation of animals. The Unicorns quietly disappeared from the circus, but the Church of All Worlds kept exhibiting theirs.
The Unicorn in Captivity, by the way, has one decidedly un-goatish feature – its horn is clearly a narwhal’s horn, with its spiral twist and excessive length.
I remember the whole Ringling Bros. ‘unicorn’ scandal back in the 80s. I never looked much into it (no internet back then) but even then two things were pretty obvious to me:
[ol]
[li]It wasn’t a horse with a horn, it was a freakin’ goat (which does not a unicorn make*!*)[/li][li]The poor thing look like it was doped out of its mind the whole time it was on display.[/li][/ol]
I remember the whole thing seem to only last one summer and then it just went away. Reading that link it’s a sad story, just what I was afraid of at the time…
I met Lancelot as a kid (um, I was a kid. He was a full grown [del] goat [/del] unicorn) and he was awesome. I’ve since, as an adult, had several conversations with Oberon and, before her death, Morning Glory, and I’m pretty damn sure he was never drugged. He was just a very mellow, well trained [del] goat [/del] unicorn.
The regretted that Ringling Bros. sale rather bitterly - not, it seemed, because of the media skerfuffle, but because they were genuinely fond of their unicorns. But they were broke and desperate.
It was the most magical experience of my 6 year old life. I was especially elated that he was shaped like “real” unicorns, not like those dopey horses with horns, even though I knew darn well he started life as a goat. (I may have spent an inordinate amount of my childhood looking at old engravings instead of modern books.)
When I worked at Busch Gardens Williamsburg (30+ yrs ago), there were many penned animals all over the park, including goats with impala-type horns. One of these had a single horn, whether by birth or maybe the other one broke off (The remaining one wasn’t centered). I call it a unicorn, but you don’t have to.
I remember seeing pictures of the Ringling Bros. unicorn and not being impressed. What exactly are horn buds, anyway. Are they deep into the skull or just on the top? I’m wondering what the relocation procedure would entail.
From what I’ve read, they are specialized bits of tissue located within the skin and not yet attached to the skull. What Dove did (and presumably Zell afterwards) was to locate these, surgically separate them from the surrounding skin (but NOT severing the blood flow to them) and relocate them. Dove took two horn buds, “shaved” them flat on adjacent sides, and fit them together before re-implanting them in the center of the “forehead”. As they grew, they attached themselves to the underlying skull (as they would have, in any case), and they grew.
If he hadn’t grafted the two buds to each other, there would be a single horn that grew into the twisted shape that bull horns do. By putting the two together, he apparently counteracted the effects, and the resulting horn grew straight. The same thing must have happened in the case of Zell’s goats – if two buds hadn’t been stuck together, instead of a straight-out unicorn horn, there would be a twisted spiral horn.
Dove claimed that his “unibull” has a gentle creature that was an “alpha” (modern terminology) bull, reflecting the properties ascribed to unicorns. I’ve always suspected that he was reading the behavior he wanted to see into the bull. He doesn’t bolster his claims with numbers or verifiable facts.
I recall hearing a theory (sorry, no cite :o) that the unicorn mythos was due to modified goats, as described, which were created a herd guardians. With the centralized horn, they had more defensive capability, especially if the tip was sharpened, since goats butt straight-on. :eek:
The virgin business came from their attachment to the shepherdess, who would be the youngest girl, typically for the culture, and was presumably, or at least given the benefit of the doubt ;), virgin. (Cue: Royal Forester)
Also, if in the process of transplantation the correct halves of the horn buds were used, the natural tendency to curve would cause a spiraling.
I doubt if spiraling would result from grafted and fused horn buds. As I say, Dove’s bull had an extremely straight horn (se the picture in my post above). Zell’s “unigoats” had pretty straight horns, too:
If the horn buds had been unbalanced, so that twisting did take place, I’d expect it to produce horns that are bent, not spiraled.
The spiral horn, as I’ve said, is probably due to inspiration from the narwhal horn, which is often spiral. In the Cloisters collection in New York’s Fort Tryon Park they have a narwhal horn on display in the same room housing the “Hunt of the Unicorn” tapestries, which makes it clear that they think, so, too. The Unicorn in those tapestries does have such a spiral horn, and it’s too damned big for the “unigoat” it’s on, so I have no doubt that the narwhal horn is behind it.
If you look at medieval illustrations of unicorns (in bestiaries and the like), they almost all lack that spiral – it’s by no means an ancient or original part of unicorn lore.
But it looks cool, so now virtually all unicorns have spirals. They even put one on the Ringling Brothers circus poster, despite the fact that their unicorn didn’t have a spiral horn:
Horn buds are very close to the surface in young goats. The standard procedure on the farm for dehorning your goats (to avoid injuries caused by the horns later…both to the farmer and other herd members) was to use an metal tool called an “iron” that was a round stick maybe one inch in diameter with a concave area in the tip. You heated the iron to red hot and touched the horn buds, which you could feel with your finger, with the iron for a few seconds. It was very similar to branding. This cauterized the blood vessels feeding the bud and it died. So then you had hornless goats.
Relocation…I dunno. My folks raised diary goats not unicorns. But I bet it would entail something almost like a skin graft, moving the section with the horn bud to the desired location, or removing a section of skin on the top of the head and suturing it back together so that you pulled the buds into close proximity to each other near the center.
I don’t entirely agree, but you are probably right.
My thought is that halves of the two horn buds, divided on the axis of curvature of the future horn, then selected to have opposing growth tendencies would balance along the growth axis, but induce a torque around the axis causing spiraling. Follow what I’m trying to say? It sounds convoluted even to me when I know what I’m trying to say.
But they might just adapt to the situation and grow straight, as you say. The pictures support that, but selecting the “tops” or “bottoms” of the buds would also eliminate the potential torque around the growth axis. And I expect chance would play into it as well. Biology is not clockwork predictable.
The Rhinocide thread just reminded me; could unicorn legends be based on the Rhinoceros, either Asian or African?
I think that’s undoubtedly the case. Our first records of the unicorn come from a Greek named Ctesias, who wrote about India, where the beast was found. It had feet like an elephant, and lots of other non-horse features. Curiously, he reported that the horn had three different colors alo ng its length (Odell Shepard suspected that the Indian owners might possibly have painted the horns taken from dead ones, which Ctesias might have seen for sale, or even on live ones.
It’s kinda hard not to see the unicorn as a rhinoceros, given all that. Couple it with the wonderful ability of medieval bestiary ilustrators to take a description and turn it into a wildly improbable beast (have a look, sometime, at what they did to the crocodile – the “Cocodryllus”) and it’s not surpriusing that the rhinceros got transformed into the horse-like unicorn.
Marco polo wasn’t fooled. In his book of travels he remarks that the Unicorn isn’;t the beautiful animal Europeans picture it as being, but a huge, coarse, ungainly beast with poor eyesight.
In any event, a lot of things go into the making of the legend. By all means, read Odell Shepard’s classic book the Lore of the Unicorn, as well as Willy Ley’s essay in the Unicorn, the Lungfish, and the Dodo 9or in Willy Ley’s Exotic Zoology)
Some researchers think a remnant population of the ancient rhinoceros species Elasmotherium may have survived into the last few thousand years in the Eurasian steppe and played a role in unicorn legends. This species grew its single horn from the forehead and not the nose.
Yeah, mentioned in the unicorn wikialso.
Antiquity is a long time ago, probably no way to determine exactly how it got started.
ETA: Just saw **Cal’**s post, more good info.
